We’ve had a beautiful December this year—with snow either falling or fallen since the first day of the month.  I say, “If we have to have winter, let’s have it with snow!”  Some of the snowfalls have been of the mesmerizing sort: the air filled with giant flakes ambling downward tipping and twirling slow enough that you can follow one flake from sky to touchdown.

It was during just one of those snowfalls several years ago that a thought suddenly overwhelmed me: materiality is the miracle. What I was blessed to understand is that we are living in the miracle.  If God is all, is spirit, did create and is creating and sustaining, then the ultimate reality that makes our existence possible is the spiritual realm, which we cannot see.  The material world that we do see—feel, hear, smell, taste—is God’s persistent miracle.  Hence for a material being to ask if miracles are possible is really a ludicrous question.  Our senses are the material gift of our Creator that allows us to know in a limited way just one small part of a reality so far beyond comprehension that our reactions to it must chiefly be humility and wonder.

It’s this truth that is the motivation for this blogsite and the chief reason we don’t get into the debate on how and how long ago God created the material world.  For more that forty years I argued and debated and debated and argued—mostly with other Christians—about what the Genesis account of creation was telling us about the scientific fashion of God’s creation work.  I was convinced, of course, that when the arrogant and self-centered ungodly person denies the Creator but is awestruck by His cosmos, he is led, as Paul tells us in Romans 1, into idolatry—to worshiping the creation instead of the Creator.  What I didn’t see, however, is that when Christians pretend that we know how and how long ago our Creator did it, we too are proud and can easily fall into a sort of “righteous idolatry” of the material world.

Frankly, I believe if anyone, Christian or non-Christian, ever claims he knows anything more than an inkling about God’s creation miracle, he ends by adding speculation to ignorance and calling it knowledge. For that reason I’m not much interested anymore in the “Great Creation Debate.”  I’m just going to be content to merely celebrate the miracle and wonder of His Creation and follow William Blake’s advice:

To see a world in a grain of sand
And a heaven in a wild flower
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand
And eternity in an hour.

See you outdoors!

Dean